Charles Cooke came here from the UK. He’s in a state of despair over how much we’ve changed.

But, consider this: A president of the United States just ran a reelection campaign based on the promise of government largess, exploitation of class division, the demonization of success, the glorification of identity politics, and the presumption that women are a helpless interest group; and he did so while steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the looming — potentially fatal — crisis that the country faces. And it worked.

Worse, as David Harsanyi has observed, “the president’s central case rests on the idea that individuals should view government as society’s moral center, the engine of prosperity and the arbiter of fairness.” This stunted and tawdry vision of American life was best summed up in his campaign’s contemptible Life of Julia cartoon, which portrayed the American Dream as being impossible without heavy cradle-to-grave government, and in which the civic society that Tocqueville correctly saw as the hallmark of the republic was wholly ignored — if not disdained outright. “Government is the only thing we all belong to,” declared a video at the opening of the Democratic National Convention. In another age, this contention would have been met with incredulity and confusion; in ours, it was cheered.

So Washington cannot be saved from itself. For the moment, tend to your state, and county, town and school district, and demonstrate the virtues of responsible self-government at the local level. Americans as a whole have joined the rest of the Western world in voting themselves a lifestyle they are not willing to earn. The longer any course correction is postponed the more convulsive it will be. Alas, on Tuesday, the electorate opted to defer it for another four years. I doubt they’ll get that long.

“We can’t expect the American People to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of Socialism, until they awaken one day to find that they have Communism.” – Nikita Khrushchev

Serving in Berlin at the time of the fall of The Wall was one of the biggest events of my life. I got to Berlin in the fall of ’85, served at Tempelhof Airport, Marienfelde and Teufelsberg. Right away my best friend and I went on a “recon” mission to the Wall in nearby Kreuzberg and found it both strangely “cool” (22 y/o at the time) and also very depressing. My German girlfriend (now wife, of nearly 25 years) lived on the 16th floor of an apartment building only 1/4 mile from The Wall. Her dad always had his binoculars nearby so that he could scan The Wall, watching the East German border guards, the dogs, vehicles, etc., etc. Her family moved to Berlin from West Germany in 1973, so she grew up with it – it was a normal part of life. But, for this “Ami”, it was an atrocity, and it seemed like it would always be there.

But, by late summer 1989, strange things began happening in the East. There were uprisings in several East Bloc countries, borders began opening up. Subsequent to this, there were protests in some of the larger East German cities – there was serious talk of possible actions against civilians to stem the tide. But, in November of 1989, we were living in Zehlendorf (section of Berlin), on a major street not very far from The Wall. I remember waking up one night with a tremendous headache – the smell was horrific, and there were horns honking, people yelling and cheering. Very quickly we turned on the TV and we saw that The Wall had fallen and East Germans were literally FLOODING into West Berlin!! Btw, the stench was from the thousands (!!) of East German “little stinkers” (Trabants and Wartburgs, which had 2-stroke lawn-mower like engines) coming into the city.

A few weeks later, my wife and I drove to West Germany to visit her grandparents. For the first 5 miles after we passed the West German border checkpoint town of Helmstedt, we started seeing Trabis and Wartburgs all along the side of the Autobahn. It quickly became clear to us what had happened. In East Germany, the speed limit was 100 km/hr (62 mph), but on this section of West German Autobahn there was no speed limit – obviously, their East German drivers had gunned these cars past their limit and burned up their little lawnmower engines!!